Poor Balak. He’s just trying to save the land he loves, playing his very last card, hoping for some magic to pull him out of the hot seat. Reality is barreling down on him like a stampede of oxen, as he says. His world is changing, and there is nothing he can do to stop it. Like Treebeard said: “The world is changing: I feel it in the water, I feel it in the earth, and I smell it in the air.” The Israelites are coming, and God, it appears, is on their side.
Three times he asks Balaam to curse the Israelites; three times Balaam blesses them instead, with the Word that God places in his mouth.
Balaam ‘takes up his parable’ and tells it to Balak:
“Balak the king of Moab has brought me from Aram, from the mountains of the east [saying], 'Come, curse Jacob for me and come invoke wrath against Israel.' How can I curse whom God has not cursed, and how can I invoke wrath if the Lord has not been angered?” (Numbers 23:7-8).
Meanwhile back at the camp, the Israelites are that very moment worshipping Baal-Peor and fornicating with the Moabite women, and God is just about to get angry with them and send a plague, which kills 24,000 of them. But Balaam says the Lord has not been angered.
Balaam says :
“God is not a man that He should lie, nor is He a mortal that He should relent. Would He say and not do, speak and not fulfill? I have received [an instruction] to bless, and He has blessed, and I cannot retract it. He does not look at evil in Jacob, and has seen no perversity in Israel; the Lord, his God, is with him, and he has the King's friendship.” (Numbers 23:19-21)
Again with the “Nope, no perversity in Israel. God loves them. And also, God doesn’t change his mind or ever have mercy.” Even though the whole bloody story is about how the Israelites keep pissing God off and God keeps getting angry and planning to obliterate them and then Moses or in this case, Eleazar’s son, manages to do something to appease God.
Balaam says:
The word of Balaam the son of Beor
and the word of the man with an open eye. The word of the one who hears God's sayings,
who sees the vision of the Almighty,
fallen yet with open eyes.
How goodly are your tents, O Jacob,
your dwelling places, O Israel!
They extend like streams,
like gardens by the river,
like aloes which the Lord planted,
like cedars by the water.
Water will flow from his wells,
and his seed shall have abundant water;
his king shall be raised over Agag,
and his kingship exalted.
God, Who has brought them out of Egypt
with the strength of His loftiness
He shall consume the nations which are his adversaries,
bare their bones and dip His arrows [into their blood].
I wonder why the Rabbis broke the parsha up where they did. If they’d ended it with Balaam blessing Israel and cursing everyone else, then it wouldn’t have been so obvious that what he says is not really the whole truth. But they tack on that extra bit about the Baal-Peor worship, and the murder of the Israelite and the Moabite women in flagrante delicto, and the last line of the parsha is “ Those that died in the plague numbered twenty four thousand.”
I’m sure I’ll find endless discussion on this very question if I look. But I’m enjoying the closed-book nature of this essay test, this time around.
Balaam speaks three times, but the first two times, God ‘chanced’ upon him and gave him the words to say. Only the third time does it say that Balaam had a vision of God. And it’s only the third blessing that Balaam doesn’t say something obviously, patently at odds with exactly what is going on down at the Israelite camp, far away below in the valley. God IS angry with Israel, and God DOES relent.
The rabbis must have thought it was important for us to notice this: that what Balaam says is at odds with the facts on the ground. True enough, for the purpose of blessing rather than cursing Israel. But not really the Truth. Not the whole truth about the relationship between God and Israel, which is more complicated than just “Israel is righteous and therefore God loves them.” That is clearly NOT what is going down there in the valley. The relationship is much more mysterious than that. But like all relationships, it can’t really be understood from outside.
The first two times he speaks, Balaam gives an outsider’s view of what is going on between Israel and God. But the third time he speaks, he speaks with an open eye. He doesn’t say Israel is righteous. He doesn’t say God never changes his mind or that God is not angry with Israel. He just says the Israelites have very nice tents, and a lot of them, and that God will ‘consume the nations which are his adversaries.’
As far as prophecy goes, that’s true. The Edomites, the Midianites, the Moabites: all gone. Assyrians, gone. Roman Empire: gone. Babylonians, Syrian Greeks -- gone. The wandering nation of Israel: still here. No one worships Baal-Peor anymore. An awful lot of people worship, in one way or another, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
Balaam spoke with an open eye to a man who wanted to be lied to. Balak wanted hope that his way of life was not passing away like Middle Earth. But something new and terrifying was thundering across the land: monotheism.
Bloody wars backed by a bloodthirsty God and waged by a bloody disobedient lot of people. We remember ourselves as victims, as seekers of justice, as liberated slaves, but we carry our holy scrolls, filled with war stories, glorious war stories, God at our heads in a pillar of cloud, smiting, always smiting. Dipping his arrows in the blood of His enemies.
Balaam spoke with an open eye. Balaam saw Reality.
I don’t want that bloody reality of his. I don’t want that bloody God of his either.
So why am I still here, among these words? Why am I looking for God in these ancient tales of tribal wars?
Balaam was like Al Gore: He spoke an inconvenient truth. Those people and their tents are coming your way, and your life is going to change, and there’s nothing you can do about it.
We have a lot of shit coming our way too, don’t we? Our lives are going to change, like it or not. Do we want to be lied to, or do we want to see with an open eye? And how, seeing with an open eye, do we keep on living? How do we find the strength to walk into that terrifying future we’ve made for ourselves?
I’m here in these words because I don’t have that kind of strength, myself. Israel has walked through the ends of ages, walked to the ends of the earth and back again. There’s nothing so special about us, just God. God who loves us anyway, God who always in the end takes pity on us, has mercy on us, relents, redeems. God who spares us, over and over, even if only just barely.
I spy with my little eye a world so terrifying I’d like to cry.
We’re not going to save ourselves. We are not clever enough, humble enough, kind enough, good enough. If we are going to be saved then God is going to have to do it. And I want to be saved. I want beauty and love and goodness to go on. I want all that is right with the world to endure, or to be resurrected from the ashes of whatever is left after we’re done trashing this good earth of ours. I don’t deserve it but I want it anyway.
Starbuck was right. There’s gotta be some kinda a way outta this place, she sang, and lucky her, God was watching over it all. It’s not all cheery and smiley though, is it? Used to think people wanted God to comfort them, and it was Thomas Kinkade false comfort they got. And then I got God and God is scary and strange and inexplicable, and the comfort God offers is not like any other kind of comfort I’ve ever had.
But that’s the only game in town. That’s Reality, scarier and more beautiful than we can bear. What’s the point? All of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again? What’s behind this world? What makes me, holds my molecules together, animates me? Why does physics make so much sense at our level, at the Newtonian level, and just get stranger and stranger the further off you go? What is the there there, and what keeps it all going each moment? A God who loves us is our only hope, and maybe it’s a long shot, but no one’s showed me why it can’t be so. God put a Word in my mouth, and the Word was God.
Here I am in all these words because I believe God speaks. Some of these words are what people thought they heard. But like Balaam we don’t usually get the whole story. We don’t hear right, or we get the simplified version, or the outsider’s view, or we can’t help but interpret even as we hear. So I dig through the words, listening. We’re all listening together. “Can you hear me now?” asks God, but we can’t, there’s too much static, the call keeps dropping out. Maybe we wouldn’t want to hear God so clearly anyway. Balaam saw with an open eye and fell on his face. Are we listening? “Hear O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One.” That bit seems clear enough. I have a terrible headache, as though I’ve been prophesying myself.
I keep circling around something important, I keep missing it, somehow. Something that will make all that blood and war make sense, make it make sense that I hold these stories holy.
This is what it is: Blood, war, plague, despair. Evil. History. Gory, gruesome history. Over and over Israel acting up, God’s judgment, God’s mercy. The stories say “oh, God decreed this.” and “God smited those.” Those are stories, is all, old stories. But God spoke to those people, whatever God did say, and there is still an echo there that we can hear today.
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